Questions and answers about English usage

Mens' or Men's?

Jody asks:I am in an argument with a sign maker at the high school I'm building. I say it should be Men's Locker Room. He said it's Mens' because Men is plural. Same with Women's Locker Room versus Womens'. Who is correct?

You are, and here's why:

In very old English, we formed plurals not with "s" but with "en": one brother, two brethren; one man, two men; one woman, two women; one child, two children; one chick, two chicken (no kidding!).

Some of those words have stayed in the language. They're plurals, but when we form a possessive of them, we treat them as singular:
Men's wear
Women's locker room
Children's education

It would be especially embarrassing in a school to have the apostrophe in the wrong place, so stick to your guns on this one!

Yes, "ladies" is the plural of "lady," but when something belongs to a lot of ladies, we need to add an apostrophe to show possession: "We are going to the ladies' meeting at church." That is, the meeting OF the ladies at church.

And for the commenter just before you: When a noun ends with a consonant + y, like lady or army or dynasty, we change it to ies when we make it a plural: ladies, armies, dynasties.

We don't do it when the noun ends with a vowel + y, like monkey or tray: monkeys, trays.

But if it's a proper noun ending in a consonant + y, like Murphy or Kennedy, we just add s: The Murphys are coming to dinner. The Kennedys are one of the great American political dynasties.

Pricey Pearl,
I used to teach English as a foreign language professionally (in Korea and Germany). Your comment sounds like one a foreign speaker might make. That's because you apparently can't internally hear what's right. Plural possessives are hard for native English speakers, so don't feel bad; however, there is no prohibition with appending an 's to a plural word in order to indicate possession.

Wouldn't 'Mens Room' without the apostrophe also be correct as rather than a room belonging to men, men is acting as an attributive noun? You rarely see Men's Room on a sign. Happy to be proven wrong, but I would not put an apostrophe here.

No more than "Vincent's comment" is a contraction of "Vincent is comment." The apostrophe-s and s-apostrophe indicate possession, whether singular or plural, and when the plural itself in an archaic one like "men" and "women," we treat the plural noun as if it were singular.

Glad to see this issue is still alive and kicking, almost ten years after I posted about it!

We have been having this debate at work for years now (work for a sign manufacturer). I understand that on a sign that says MEN'S LOCKERS, the apostrophe goes after the N due to it's already a plural and shows possession. But is the apostrophe necessary since there are no other grammatical elements? It has to be all caps for accessibility compliance, no verbs, prepositions or even a dangling participle. So we only follow the one rule of the apostrophe. Maybe this is more of a question for the sign industry to answer, but I wanted to check in here first. Thanks